I am inclined to believe that a similar valuation may be applied to autobiography. The writer’s gift to fellow humans is his or her gifts, the bounty of the creative imagination which comes from no-one knows where or why. The persona of the writer is the vessel. Whether it is flamboyantly decorated by a life-style of excess in alcoholism, adventurism, sexual experiment, or whether it is sparsely chased by what appears to be domestic dullness, its content has been poured into the work; the truth of it is there. (Sometimes in spite of the author. .) Of course there are exceptions, but in general fiction writers who produce autobiographies are those whose autobiographies are better than their novels. Which has something to indicate about the limitation of their gifts. Let the biographers trace the chronology of life from the circumstances of the birth to the honoured or forgotten grave. What that span produced is already extant, transformed, freed from place and time.
The aphorisms, parables, allegories in the latest work of Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography, have no dates appended. It’s of no account when he wrote them. The back-and-forth of a mind creating its consciousness expands and contracts, rather than roves between past and present, with a totality which is not merely memory. Indeed, with the wry humour that flashes through profundity in all his thinking, Mahfouz meets memory as ‘an enormous person with a stomach as large as the ocean, and a mouth that could swallow an elephant. I asked him in amazement, “Who are you, sir?” He answered with surprise, “I am forgetfulness. How could you have forgotten me?” ‘ The totality is comprehension of past and present experience as elements which exist contemporaneously. These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are — in the words of the title of one of its prose pieces—‘The Dialogue of Late Afternoon’ of his life. I don’t believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have matched what we have here.
If the prose pieces in Echoes of an Autobiography have no dates they do each have a title, and these in themselves are what one might call the essence of the essence of Mahfouz’s discoveries in and contemplation of life. The preoccupations so marvellously explored in his fiction appear almost ideographically, the single word or phrase standing for morality, justice, time, religion, memory, sensuality, beauty, ambition, death, freedom. And all these are regarded through a changing focus: narrowing briefly to cynical; taking the middle distance of humour and affection; opening wide to reverence. Prompted by his own words — another title, ‘The Train of the Unexpected’—I take the liberty of paraphrasing myself in what I have remarked elsewhere of Mahfouz: he has the gift of only great writers to contemplate all the possibilities inherent in life rather than discard this or that awkwardness for consistency. The stimulus of his writing comes from the conflict of responses he elicits.
In ‘A Man Reserves a Seat’ a bus from a working-class suburb and a private car from a wealthy one set out for Cairo’s station at the same moment, and arrive at the same time, colliding in an accident in which both are slightly damaged. But a man passing between the two is crushed and dies. ‘He was crossing the Square to book a seat on the train going to Upper Egypt.’ As one reads this laconic concluding sentence, almost an aside, the title suddenly leaps out, heavy type, in all the complexity of the many meanings it may carry. I read it thus: rich and poor arrive at the same point in human destiny whatever their means. Even the man who travels with neither, seeking to pass between the two, cannot escape; you cannot reserve a seat in destiny. There is no escape from the human condition, the final destination of which is death.
Naguib Mahfouz is an old man and it would be natural for him to reflect on that destiny/destination, inescapable for believers and unbelievers alike. But those of us who know his work know that he always has had death in mind as part of what life itself is. We are all formed by the social structures which are the corridors through which we are shunted and it is a reflection of the power of bureaucracy, the Egyptian civil service as regulator of existence and the height of ambition for a prestigious career, that his allegory of death should be entitled ‘The Next Posting’. The question with which the allegory ends is one he may be asking himself now, but that he has contemplated for his fictional characters much earlier: ‘Why did you not prepare yourself when you knew it was your inevitable destiny?’ It is said — perhaps be has said, although he takes care to evade interviews and ‘explanations’ of his work — that Marcel Proust has influenced him. ‘Shortly Before Dawn’, ‘Happiness’, and ‘Music’ are disparate encounters in old age, where we shall not be recognizable to one another, as in the final gathering at the end of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, but the mood is un-Proustian in the compensation that something vivid remains from what one has lost. In ‘Music’ the singer has been forgotten but the tawashih music she sang is still a delight. Life takes up the eternal, discards the temporal.
Politics: almost as inevitable as death, in account of a lifetime in Mahfouz’s span and ours, children of the twentieth century. The morality of politics is intricately and inextricably knotted to the morality of personal relations in Mahfouz’s masterpiece, The Cairo Trilogy, and in some of his lesser works. In ‘Layla’ (the title is the woman’s name in a tale in Echoes of an Autobiography) sexual morality is another strand. ‘In the days of the struggle of ideas’ Layla was a controversial figure. ‘An aura of beauty and allurement’ surrounded her and while some saw her as a liberated pioneer of freedom, others criticised her as nothing but an immoral woman. ‘When the sun set and the struggle and ideas disappeared from sight. . many emigrated. . Years later they returned, each armed with a purse of gold and a cargo of disrepute.’ Layla laughs, and enquires, ‘I wonder what you have to say now about immorality?’ The essential question ‘When will the state of the country be sound?’ is answered: ‘When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.’ But this politico-moral imperative is not so easy to follow. In a political dispute (‘The Challenge’) a minister in government is asked, ‘Can you show me a person who is clean and unsullied?’, and the answer comes: ‘You need but one example of many — the children, the idiotic, and the mad — and the world’s still doing fine!’
Again, Mahfouz’s surprise about-face startles, flipping from biting condemnation to — what? Irony, cynicism, accusatory jeers at ourselves? Or is there a defiance there? The defiance of survival, if not ‘doing fine’ morally, then as expressed by the courtesan in ‘Question and Answer’ who says, ‘I used to sell love at a handsome profit, and I came to buy it at a considerable loss. I have no other choice with this wicked but fascinating life.’ In ‘Eternity’ one of the beggars, outcast sheikhs, and blind men who wander through Mahfouz’s works as the elusive answer to salvation, says, ‘With the setting of each sun I lament my wasted days, my declining countries, and my transitory gods.’ It is a cry of mourning for the world that Mahfouz sounds here; but not an epitaph, for set against it is the perpetuation, no choice, of this ‘wicked but fascinating life’.
At a seminar following a lecture I gave on Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy at Harvard a few years ago some feminists attacked his depiction of women characters in the novel; they were outraged at the spectacle of Amina, Al-Sayid Ahmad Abd al-Jawal’s wife, forbidden to leave the family house unless in the company of her husband, and at the account of the fate of the girls in the family, married off to men of Jawal’s choice without any concern for their own feelings, and without the possibility of an alternative independent existence. The students were ready to deny the genius of the novel on these grounds. It was a case of killing the messenger: Mahfouz was relaying the oppression of Amina and her daughters as it existed; he was not its advocate. His insight to the complex socio-sexual mores, the seraglio-prison that distorted the lives of women members of Jawal’s family, was a protest far more powerful than that of those who accused him of literary chauvinism.